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Abstract. Without
mass media, openness and accountability are impossible in
contemporary democracies.Nevertheless, mass media can hinder political transparency as
well as help it. Politicians and political operatives can simulate
the political virtues of transparency through rhetorical and media
manipulation. Television tends to convert coverage of law and
politics into forms of entertainment for mass consumption, and
television serves as fertile ground for a self-proliferating culture
of scandal. Given the limited time available for broadcast and the
limited attention of audiences, stories about political strategy,
political infighting, political scandal and the private lives of
politicians tend to crowd out less entertaining stories about
substantive policy questions.Political life begins to conform increasingly to the image of
politics portrayed on television. Through a quasi-Darwinian process,
media events, scandals, and other forms of politics-as-entertainment
eventually dominate and weed out other forms of political information
and public discussion, transforming the very meaning of public discourse.In this way the goals of political transparency can be
defeated by what appear to be its central mechanisms: proliferating
information, holding political officials accountable for their
actions, and uncovering secrets.

Introduction

This essay concerns the mass medias
contributions to the political values of openness and democratic
accountability that go by the name of transparency. In
fact, the metaphor of transparency encompasses three separate
political virtues, which often work together but are analytically
distinct. The first kind of transparency is informational
transparency: knowledge about government actors and decisions and
access to government information. Informational transparency can be
furthered by requiring public statements of the reasons for
government action, or requiring disclosure of information the
government has collected. A second type of transparency is
participatory transparency: the ability to participate in political
decisions either through fair representation or direct participation.
A third kind of transparency is accountability transparency: the
ability to hold government officials accountable  either to the
legal system or to public opinion  when they violate the law or
when they act in ways that adversely affect peoples interests.[1]

In theory, at least, mass media can make the
political system more transparent in all three respects:
mass media can help people understand the operations of government,
participate in political decisions, and hold government officials
accountable. In practice, however, its effects are often quite
different. In the age of mass media, democratic governments and
politicians may find it useful to simulate the political virtues of
transparency through rhetorical and media manipulation. This
simulated transparency does not serve the underlying political values
that motivate the metaphor of transparency. Instead, it is a
transparency that obscures and obfuscates, that frustrates
accountability and hides important information in a mass of
manufactured political realities. It is a form of transparency that
is not transparent at all.

Today political transparency is virtually
impossible without some form of mass media coverage. However, mass
media can frustrate the values of political transparency even while
appearing to serve those values. When politicians and political
operatives attempt to simulate transparency and appropriate the
rhetoric of openness and accountability, the mass media does not
always counteract the simulation. Indeed, it may actually tend to
proliferate it.

People often oppose transparency to secrecy.
However, governments and politicians can manipulate the presentation
and revelation of information to achieve the same basic goals as a
policy of secrecy and obfuscation. There are two basic strategies:
divert audience attention, and supplement politics with new realities
that crowd out and eventually displace other political realties and
political issues. In this way political transparency can be defeated
by what appear to be its own mechanisms: proliferating information,
holding political officials accountable, and uncovering things that
are secret.[2]

Strategies of Simulation

The very metaphor of transparency suggests a
medium through which we view things. We want the medium to be
transparent to vision so that we can accurately view what is on the
other side.[3]

This metaphor assumes:

(1) That the medium is conceptually separate from
the object on the other side; and

(2) That the process of seeing through the medium
does not substantially alter the nature of the object viewed.

Both of these assumptions turn out to be false
when the medium is television and the object to be viewed is
governance. The medium is not conceptually distinct from the
operations of governance because governance occurs through using the
medium. Moreover, seeing things through the medium of television
substantially alters the object being viewed. Indeed, television
creates its own political reality: a televised politics and a public
sphere of discourse organised around media coverage of politics. This
sphere of discourse is self-reflexive and self-reproducing 
television coverage of politics is part of politics, and hence media
discourse about politics continually supplements and alters the
politics that it purports to portray.

How do mass media simulate and subvert political
transparency? The basic idea is simple. Sometimes the most effective
strategy for hiding something may be to leave it out in the open, and
merely alter the context in which people view it. Instead of hiding
facts, one should instead seek to change background realities. Large
law firms in the United States have long understood this point. When
faced with requests for discovery in civil cases, they understand
that simply stonewalling to avoid the disclosure of sensitive
information is not always the most effective strategy. Instead they
can adopt a dual strategy of aggressive overcompliance coupled with
strategic manoeuvre. They flood the other side with so much
information and so many documents  most of them extraneous
 that the other side lacks the time or ability to find the
relevant information. At the same time, the law firm can raise
continual technical objections to the progress of discovery, without
ever ultimately withholding anything.[4]

These tactics are most useful against a weaker,
smaller opponent with less information processing and filtering
resources. They are designed to demoralise the other side, raise the
costs of litigation, and divert time and energy from the most
important substantive questions in the lawsuit. In this way one can
use the discovery process  which is, after all, designed to
achieve a certain kind of informational transparency  to
undermine the values of transparency. One can use the form of
transparency to achieve substantial obscurity.

This example demonstrates the two basic strategies
for simulating transparency: diversion of attention and
supplementation of reality. The goal is to consume the opponents
time and attention. Equally important, one tries to shift the ground
of battle to issues of information management and technical questions
of procedure. In short, one creates a new practical legal reality for
the opponent. This new reality competes with and displaces the
substantive issues that originally motivated the lawsuit. In other
words, the skilfully played discovery battle creates new objects of
contention: it produces ever new things to be concerned about, to
become angry about, and to fight about.

In the public arena, simulation of transparency
also uses diversion and supplementation. But although the public is
trying to obtain information, it is not in the same position as a
litigant. Politicians and the mass media do not necessarily regard
the public as an adversary. Rather politicians seek to shape and
benefit from public opinion, and mass media seek to entertain the
public and maintain public attention and influence. Nevertheless, in
achieving these ends politicians and the media, both collectively and
agonistically, divert audience attention and supplement politics with
new political realities.

The Special Role of Television

One can well understand why politicians would want
to divert attention from information that is detrimental to their
interests. But why would the mass media have an interest in
simulating transparency? Indeed, the medias interests are quite
different than those of politicians. Nevertheless the medias
collective efforts also subvert the political values of transparency,
even  and perhaps especially  when media and politicians
view each other as adversaries.

Many different kinds of mass media can simulate
transparency. But the dominant medium of political communication in
our age  and hence the dominant medium of political
transparency  is television. To understand how television
simulates transparency, we must understand how television shapes what
we see through it. When we use television to understand politics, we
see things in the way that television allows them to be seen. At the
same time, television creates new forms of political reality that
exist because they are seen on television.

Television tends to emphasise entertainment value.
It subjects culture to a Darwinian process: The less entertaining is
weeded out, the more entertaining survives to be broadcast. Hence
coverage of public events, politics, and even law must eventually
conform to the requirements of good television, that is,
the kind of television that grabs and keeps viewers attention
by absorbing and entertaining them (Balkin, 1998).[5]

Television encourages coverage that focuses on the
personal celebrity of participants and on the sporting elements of
political conflict (Fallows, 1996; Postman, 1985). Over time,
television coverage of politics tends to focus less on substantive
policy issues than on the techniques of securing political advantage
and political viability (Fallows, 1996; Bennett, 1996). The question
of whos winning and how are they achieving this
victory tends to dominate television coverage. In one sense stories
about backstage political manoeuvring and spin control offer a kind
of transparency, because they purport to give viewers an
inside account of the strategic considerations of
politicians and public officials. But in another sense they divert
attention from substantive policy debates. Given the limited time
available for broadcast and the limited attention of audiences,
inside stories about strategy and jockeying for political
advantage tend to crowd out stories about substantive policy questions.

Moreover, because politicians understand how
important mass media have become to retaining power and influencing
citizens, television helps create a new reality populated by spin
doctors, pollsters, pundits and media consultants. Thus eventually
political life begins to conform more closely to the image of
politics that television portrays it to be. Television portrays a
world of image manipulation and spin control largely devoid of
substantive debate or reasoned analysis. Because television is so
central to successful mass politics, it eventually helps produce the
very elements that it portrays. We might call this a self-fulfilling representation.

Television coverage of law has analogous effects.
Television converts law into a form of entertainment suitable for
consumption by lay audiences (Postman, 1985). Television has created
a world of law-related shows and legal commentators whose basic goal
is to describe law in ways that are comprehensible to television
audiences and that can hold their attention. This means, among other
things, that law must become entertaining (Balkin, 1992). Certain
features of law  the thrust and parry of contention in lawsuits
and criminal trials  seem tailor made for television coverage.
But the image of law that television portrays reshapes the adversary
system in televisions image. Law-as-entertainment seems to
bring the legal system closer to the public, but it actually
substitutes a transformed product  televised law. Public
imagination about law used to be nourished by television dramas and
made-for-TV movies; now it is increasingly shaped by television
coverage of legal events themselves which are served up as popular
entertainment and displayed through the lens of television commentary
(Balkin, 1992).[6]

In a very short time the Internet has become an
important medium of political communication that rivals television.
The Internet is not yet televisual; it employs mostly text and still
pictures. Even so, the Internet has shaped and enhanced the effects
of television in three ways. First, the Internet has helped to
shorten the news cycle of reporting, in part because stories can be
constantly updated on the Internet with relative ease. A shorter news
cycle tends to promote more continuous television coverage of news
events, especially on cable networks. Second, because the Internet
makes mass distribution of information relatively inexpensive, it
helps proliferate new kinds of information from new sources 
including gossip and second-hand reports  that television can
pick up and disseminate, assuming that the information passes muster
under existing standards of television journalism. Third, for similar
reasons, the Internet makes possible new journalistic sources that
compete with television coverage, and new journalistic practices that
may occasionally affect the form and content of television coverage
and the standards of television journalists. Hence, the Internet can
help exacerbate televisions tendency to emphasise celebrity,
inside strategy and gossip, and televisions conversion of law
and politics into forms of entertainment, even though the Internet is
not yet a fully televisual medium.

Media Events

Media events are familiar methods of manipulating
political transparency. Politicians stage events specifically
designed to be covered by the mass media. Media events show
politicians engaged in the business of governing or carefully
deliberating over public policy issues. Another class of media event
shows the politician with his or her family, participating in casual
activities, or in a seemingly unguarded and intimate moment.[7]

Media events that involve displays of governance
are designed to look governmental, and media events involving
displays of personal affect are designed to look spontaneous.
American politics has employed media events for many years. The
Reagan Administration developed them to a high art form.[8]
Almost all public presidential appearances now consist in some form
of media event, merging the act of governance with media display. The
Clinton Administration has used media events to great advantage: As
President Clinton lost the ability to push large scale reforms
through a recalcitrant Congress, he increasingly took to governing
through small scale initiatives like encouraging the adoption of
school uniforms. These initiatives were announced and touted in a
series of media events designed to make his presidency appear active,
robust, and engaged with popular sentiments and concerns.[9]

Media events perform a jujitsu move on the
political values of transparency. The goal of political transparency
is to help people watch over the operations of government and the
behaviour of government officials. The point of the media event is to
encourage watching. The media event is a form of political
exhibitionism that simulates effective governance and personal candour.

By demanding our attention, and the attention of
the news media, media events appear to offer us substantive
information although what they actually offer is largely political
image and showmanship. Moreover, by commanding media attention, media
events trade on a fundamental difficulty facing all forms of
political transparency. This is the problem of audience scarcity.

Most individuals have only limited time and
attention to devote to public issues. Political values of
transparency do not demand that citizens spend all of their time on
public subjects. Rather, they make information available to
individuals so that they can use it if they so choose. But when there
is too much information, filtering necessarily occurs. This filtering
occurs both in terms of what media decide to cover and what
individuals decide to watch. Media companies must pick and choose
among hundreds of possible subjects to discuss. Individuals must
choose among thousands of hours of potential coverage of public events.

The need for filtering enhances the power of media
events. By flooding the media with ready made press releases and
staged pageants that function as good television,
politicians provide media with easily edited programming that can be
strung together in televised sequences. Providing media with
good television allows politicians to capture more and
more of the medias coverage. This diverts media attention from
information that might actually be more useful to the political goals
of participation, information, and accountability.

Moreover, media events do not simply add new
information to the mix; they also drive out other forms of coverage
through a sort of Greshams law of mass media. The media event
is deliberately designed to be a watchable, ready-made form of
political entertainment, one that can be easily chopped up and edited
for news broadcasts. It is relatively cheap to cover, and easy to
broadcast. News organisations quickly learn that it takes less effort
to accept what is given them by politicians than to develop
entertaining news programming on their own.[10]

For these reasons media events can affect the
behaviour of news organisations that are fully aware of their
simulated character. Well-planned media events can displace other
forms of reporting that take greater time and effort to produce. By
thrusting entertainment in our face, politicians effectively keep us
from watching other things. And because politicians, and especially
presidents, increasingly govern through media events, news
organisations feel an obligation to cover them. Media events, in
short, both divert political attention and supplement political reality.

The Public and the Private

Many people have noted and decried the mass
medias increasing intrusion into the private lives of public
figures. Although coverage of entertainers and sports
figures private lives has been common for many years, the
phenomenon has clearly invaded political life as well. The Clinton
scandals have made possible discussion of private sexual conduct in
the mainstream press that would have been unthinkable only a few
years before.[11]

Media coverage of the private lives of public
figures is actually a form of informational transparency, although
not necessarily one that serves democratic values. Increasingly the
mass media have endeavoured to make the private lives of public
figures transparent to the ordinary viewer. For many people this
evolution of journalistic standards is a travesty, because it diverts
attention from public issues. But as noted before,
increasing intrusion into private lives does not merely divert
attention  it also helps create and supplement public
discourse; it fosters new political realities that cannot easily be
avoided, as politicians ranging from Gary Hart to Bill Clinton have
discovered to their chagrin. Repeated focus on the private
eventually alters the boundaries between public and private; it
changes the nature of what is appropriately withheld from public
scrutiny. Revelations of the previously private also
alter the meaning of public discourse or public
issues. The very pervasiveness and availability of information
(or rumours) about the private lives of public officials reinforces
the idea that such private behaviour is not wholly private 
that it raises public issues about which the public should be
concerned. In the 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns Clintons
opponents used the term character issue to show the
connection between things formerly thought private and public concerns.

The character issue was not an artificial creation
of Clintons Republican opponents. It was fostered by repeated
media investigations into the private lives of many different public
officials before Clinton, and it was encouraged by the changes in
public discourse brought about by these investigations. Journalists,
in turn, have adapted the rhetoric of political transparency to
defend their emerging investigative practices, to rationalise greater
sexual frankness in reporting of news stories, and to justify their
sense of greater entitlement to investigate and report on the private
lives of public officials, including their infidelities, their sexual
orientations, and their sexual habits.

Many journalists defend their evolving practices
using language that sounds very much like a defence of political
transparency: The public, they argue, has a right to know. Moreover,
although some revelations may ultimately prove immaterial to
political issues, journalists should place all potentially relevant
information before the public and let the public choose whether it is
relevant to democratic decision making.[12]
This rhetoric has three effects.

First, it equates public knowledge about (for
example) the Presidents sexual habits with public knowledge
about the details of foreign or domestic policy, and with information
that government collects on private citizens through surveillance.

Second, by making these new forms of knowledge
part of democratic decision-making, journalists change the contours
of public discourse and the definition of a public issue.
Journalists do not simply respect the existing boundaries of the
public and the private but actively reshape them. Merely by talking
about sexual scandal and encouraging others to do so, journalists
make these topics part of public discourse and public comment.

Third, by adding formerly excised information
about sexual conduct to public discourse, journalists inevitably
create competition for public attention between stories about
politicians private lives and stories about other aspects of
public concern, for example, the details of public policy debates. In
this competition, stories about sexual and personal matters are
likely to grab a greater share of attention. By adding sexual scandal
to the mix of competing stories, journalists change the odds that
other forms of information will survive the inevitable filtering that
occurs when information is too plentiful. It is somewhat like
introducing a particularly virulent weed into a flower garden: one
should not be surprised if the weed monopolises increasing amounts of
space while less hardy plants are choked off.

This effect occurs even if the public does not
think that private or sexual matters are appropriate to
judging the performance of public officials. For what draws audience
attention is not what the public regards as relevant to public policy
but what it regards as entertaining. For example, polls have
repeatedly suggested that most Americans do not think President
Clintons alleged peccadillos undermine their confidence in his
performance as president, although they have undermined their respect
for him.[13]
Nevertheless, the details of the Lewinsky scandal formed continuous
fodder for talk shows, and for months consumed a considerable portion
of nightly news broadcasts. Reports about scandal grab attention even
if the scandal itself is considered irrelevant to public policy by
the very public that watches the reports. As a result, the purported
expansion of information in the name of the publics right
to know is effectively a contraction of public discourse,
because audience time is limited. Through a Darwinian mechanism,
information about sexual scandal proliferates and drives out
information that constitutes or could potentially constitute other
elements of public discourse.

The very question of what is appropriately a
public issue or an appropriate story to
broadcast is not based on a fixed set of standards. Rather, it is the
product of the joint activities of all who call themselves
journalists, and depends on their existing professional standards and
their expectations about likely public reaction to their reports.
Because each journalist has the potential ability to alter the mix of
stories competing in the public sphere, journalists as a whole face a
collective action problem in maintaining the boundaries of what is
public and what is private. If one journalist changes the contours of
the public through a series of revelations, other journalists may
feel compelled to follow along. Journalists may feel duty bound to
report whatever is in fact in the public sphere of discussion. Once
one journalist has broken a story, it has been inserted into the
public arena, thus lessening the sense of responsibility felt by
other journalists.[14]
Moreover, once a story has been inserted into public discussion, the
incentives of media actors follow a familiar logic: Because
journalists believe that certain kinds of stories are more likely to
gain valuable and limited audience attention than others, they must
respond when other journalists produce stories likely to garner the
lions share of attention because of their salacious or dramatic
elements. The result is a self-amplifying focus or a feeding
frenzy around certain topics (Sabato, 1991).

It is important to recognise that this effect can
occur even though all journalists do not share the same standards of
what is newsworthy. It can occur even though mainstream or high
prestige journalists usually demand more corroboration or more
reliable sources than other journalists before they will publish a
story. For example, journalists in traditional metropolitan dailies
take great pains to distinguish their standards and practices from
those of Matt Drudges Drudge Report. Drudges Internet-based
column regularly acts as a foil to the journalistic standards of the
mainstream media. However, once a journalist like Drudge publishes a
story, this sends a few journalists scurrying to confirm it. If they
cannot confirm it according to their higher standards, the story does
not spread to more mainstream outlets. However, once there is
confirming evidence  as judged by the standards of a given
group of professional journalists  there is pressure on those
journalists to repeat the substance of the story. Eventually this
creates a sort of cascade effect. This cascade occurs even if there
are different groups of journalists with different standards of
verification. And once a story breaks through a certain level of
mainstream journalistic judgement, it is very difficult
to stop the story.[15]

Fourth, by arguing that the public has a right to
know about private issues, journalists can present
themselves as more devoted to transparency than journalists of the
past. While journalists previously would have killed stories about
private sexual behaviour, contemporary journalists can claim that
they are offering a freer, more open form of public debate in which
they no longer play the role of paternalistic gatekeepers. Some
journalists can even convince themselves that they are empowering the
public through these revelations. But instead of empowering their
audiences or increasing information, journalists may in fact simply
be altering the mix of stories presented to the public; the practical
effect may be a contraction of the scope of public discourse.

However, we should not lay blame for these changes
entirely at the feet of journalists and media executives. In fact,
politicians themselves have contributed to the gradual change in the
contours of public discussion. Politicians, like other public
figures, have discovered over time that in a world shaped by
television, it is increasingly important to communicate not only
information but also ethos. Public figures hope to persuade and
possibly manipulate their audiences by presenting themselves as
likeable or down-to-earth characters that a television audience can
relate to. Using television to humanise public figures is related to
the rise of media events as a form of governance.

By displaying their personalities for consumption
by television audiences, public figures simulate yet another form of
transparency  the transparency of ethos.The television audience gains access to what the public
figure is really like up close and personal.
Celebrities and public figures who appear regularly appear on
television try to garner high popularity ratings by appearing close
to their viewers. In this respect television differs somewhat from
motion pictures; movie actors may deliberately attempt to establish
aloofness or distance from their fans. Fans of television actors, on
the other hand, often think themselves closer to the actors as people.

Politicians have learned that the appearance of
intimacy or the production of an attractive ethos on television is
very helpful to political success. As a result, many public figures
have attempted to project as far as possible a personable, warm, or
approachable image appropriate for television. Public figures who
appear distant, cold, or uncaring on television generally succeed in
spite of their appearance.

In order to simulate a transparency of ethos,
politicians and public figures have been collapsing the distance
between the public figure and his or her private persona for some
time. They have attempted to connect with viewers and voters by
emphasising their emotional availability, friendliness, and closeness
to voters in ways dictated by the medium of television. Successful
politicians have always run on character issues and emphasised their
own good character. But television culture gradually changes the sort
of character the successful politician must portray. To succeed as a
television personality, politicians have tended to emphasise elements
of their persona that might otherwise be thought private;
they have shown more and more of their (seemingly) private
sides to the public. They show themselves to be family
people. They engage in confessional displays, revealing private
features of their past, their familys past, or their
familys current difficulties. They provide seemingly unguarded
moments of revelation and deep connection to the voters. They emote
on cue in public. To a large extent this presentation of the private
side of a politicians life is a fabrication  it is the
work of publicity agents and campaign staffs. Nevertheless,
politicians persist in it because it works well in terms of the
dominant medium of political communication  television.

But this simulated transparency comes at a cost.
Simulating a transparent ethos for television necessarily
reconfigures the boundaries between publicity and privacy. The more
politicians attempt to use television as a means of establishing
closeness to their constituents, the more they erase the boundaries
between the public official and what they promote as his or her
private persona. The exhibition of a private persona for public
consumption invites the public to expect that elements of the private
appropriately merge with a politicians public persona and hence
are appropriate subjects of public discussion. Politicians have
manipulated television imagery for so long that they have helped to
create the very erasure of public and private persona that now haunts them.[16]
They have been willing accomplices in the creation of a new political
culture that sees private aspects of a persons life as
politically relevant, that collapses older boundaries between public
and private. The current wave of media propagated scandals in the
United States is the price we are currently paying for the
construction of a simulated transparency between governments and the governed.[17]

The Culture of Scandal

The Clinton/Lewinsky scandal in the United States
is part of a more general cultural phenomenon, in which the news
media rush from big story to big story. These
stories usually but not always have elements of scandal in them. They
range from Whitewater to the O. J. Simpson trial to the Gianni
Versace murder to the death of Princess Diana to the 1996 campaign
finance scandal to the sexual scandal that ultimately led to
Clintons impeachment in December of 1998. When the scandal
concerns public officials  as the Lewinsky scandal did 
the culture of scandal appears to involve successive acts of
revelation about misdeeds by public officials. Thus it appears to
strike a blow for informational transparency and accountability transparency.

In fact the present culture of scandal in the
United States is not really a culture of increased political
transparency. Our current culture of political scandal is a
self-replicating, self-reproducing cultural phenomenon. It is a
cultural virus that spreads like an epidemic through the public
sphere. It produces and proliferates discussion about elements of the
scandal but it does not necessarily bring us closer to understanding
the workings of government or making government officials more
accessible or accountable.

(1) Stories about the lawyers representing
principals in the case, stories about people who may or may not have
leaked information to the press, stories about Monica Lewinsky, and
stories about her co-workers, associates, friends, or, indeed, anyone
who had ever met her or dealt with her in any capacity.

(2) Stories about the legal process viewed as a
form of sports competition or entertainment. Reporters speculated
about who was ahead: the President, Independent Counsel Kenneth
Starr, Congressional Democrats or Congressional Republicans.

(3) Stories about the political advantage to be
gained by, and the political viability of, the President, the
independent counsel, and other political figures.

(4) News programs and talk shows featuring endless
accusations by political operatives, pundits, representatives of the
President and of the Democratic and Republican parties. These
programs created countless opportunities for presidential defenders
and critics to accuse each other of bad faith, of political
grandstanding, of slowing the investigation down, of railroading the
investigation, of hiding the truth, of engaging in Gestapo tactics in
investigation, of abusing the grand jury process, of abusing the
discovery process, of abusing the impeachment process, of
misunderstanding the Constitution, of misleading the press, of
misleading the public, of being in secret alliance with unscrupulous
members of the press, of being in secret alliance with unscrupulous
political operatives, and so on. These accusations, in turn, led to
still further stories about whether and to what extent the President
was the victim of ordinary politics or a vast right
wing conspiracy. Further stories within stories appeared about
the sources and origins of leaks, and the ethics and legality of
producing leaks. Finally there were stories about Starrs
prosecutorial tactics, his ability or inability to defend the
accusations made against him, and the costs of his investigation,
both in terms of taxpayer money and in terms of legal fees expended
by people sucked into the investigation.

(5) Endless stories by the mass media concerning
their own coverage of these events, including discussions about who
first uncovered a particular piece of information, how it was first
uncovered, the reactions to the revelation, the reaction to those
reactions, and so on. Media coverage of media coverage provided
endless opportunities to discuss:

(a) The medias professional and ethical
responsibilities in reporting or failing to report particular
information that came to their attention, or in asking or not asking
particular questions of the principals involved in the investigation;

(b) The decision by various actors in the scandal
to leak or not to leak information to the media, including the
ethical, professional, and political consequences of decisions to
leak or not to leak; and

(c) Whether the media was biased in a particular
direction in its coverage of different principals in the scandal.
Eventually this turned on itself, and produced a series of stories
asking whether the media was biased in the coverage of its own
activities in covering the scandal.[18]

These various forms of cultural proliferation
ensure that the culture of scandal does not simply repeat the same
stories and accusations over and over again. Rather, the culture
innovates and mutates as it proliferates discourse. It finds ever new
angles to discuss. It chews over the events repeatedly, generating
new lines of inquiry and new ways to cover the events. In so doing,
the scandal produces ever new events to cover, which are folded into
the general culture of the scandal. The culture of scandal, in short,
proliferates discourse about itself.

News media in the United States have launched
multiple shows giving multiple experts opportunities to discuss the
scandal, events related to the scandal, media coverage of events
related to the scandal and media coverage of the media coverage of
events related to the scandal. Although scandals are to some degree
inherently interesting to audiences, the events of the scandal must
be assessed and approached from many different angles in order to
sustain viewer interest. The culture of scandal proliferates itself,
like a mutating virus, constantly changing its features in order to
grow more widely and spread more rapidly.

This is due in part to the nature of television
coverage. Over time, big scandals, like other big stories such as the
death of Princess Diana, have created the expectation  and
hence the need  that individuals can turn on the television at
any time in the day and learn something about the details of the
scandal. This is especially so in the early days of a scandal or
major media story: between the various cable and broadcast channels
one usually finds the equivalent of continuous coverage. (The
continuous updating of information on the Internet has probably
accelerated this tendency.) Expectations about continuous coverage of
a story and the fact that it is being continuously broadcast produce
continual discursive experimentation and innovation with the story
over a relatively short period of time. As the media discuss the
story over and over again, the story mutates and is recreated
literally before our eyes. The need to talk about scandal incessantly
creates the need to have something to talk about, which in turn
generates the multiple angles, approaches, accusations and
counter-accusations that keep the conversation moving and produce
ever new angles to the story. By further shortening the news cycle,
the Internet has added fuel to the fire, providing fresh
opportunities for discussion and dissemination of gossip.

Proliferation of discussion about a scandal
sometimes leads to the creation of new television shows originally
devoted to aspects of the scandal but which eventually take on a life
of their own. The O. J. Simpson trial, for example, led to the
creation of CNNs legal affairs show Burden of Proof
and budding television careers for Greta Van Susteren and Roger
Cossack. The father of all late night news programs  ABCs Nightline
 originated out of the mother of all political scandals,
the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-80. Initial interest in the crisis
led to a nightly audience for the show, which led to ABCs
promise that it would continue to cover events until the hostages
were released. When the crisis dragged on, ABC made a virtue out of
necessity and created a new genre of news program.[19]

Because scandal proliferates discourse, it does
not necessarily lead to truth, revelations of falsehood, or depth of
coverage. Proliferating discourse does not increasingly get to the
truth  rather it approaches the question of what is true from
increasingly diverse angles of inquiry. A scandals natural
trajectory is not towards depth but rather breadth of coverage
 it ceaselessly expands its agenda for discussion outward,
capturing more and more subjects and individuals as possible topics
of discourse.

Once again we can see a Darwinian logic at work.
More time spent on covering the scandal and its mushrooming concerns
means less time for coverage of other events. Once again what starts
as a demand for transparency  of information and of
accountability  ends as diversion and as the creation of a new
reality that crowds out other information and other public concerns.
As before, this proliferation of discourse does not merely divert our
attention  it creates a new political and legal reality
complete with new agendas and social meanings. Eventually, the
scandal proliferates political realities and makes its discourses
politically important and politically salient because it is being
covered and discussed. Hence one cannot say that the culture of
scandal merely disguises political life. It fosters it, multiplies
it, mutates it, supplements it and eventually substitutes for it.
Like a particularly obnoxious weed in a field of grass, the culture
of scandal gradually pushes aside other discourses and threatens to
consume a greater and greater share of public attention, public
discussion and public opinion. It becomes politics as actually
practiced. It becomes public discourse as actually discussed.

Conclusion

To some extent the phenomena I have described in
this essay are simply the by-products and imperfections of a normally
functioning democratic system. Taken to an extreme, however, they can
prove troublesome. My sense is that the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal
 which produced the first presidential impeachment in over a
century  is a pathological tendency rather than an instance of
democratic politics as usual. There may be little that can be done at
this point to remedy the damage this particular scandal has created.
But we can well ask what we should do for the future.

The most direct approach, in the form of
censorship or regulations on political speech, is surely
unconstitutional, and is destined in any case to fail. Instead of
attempting to block these tendencies, one must rather supplement them
with healthier ones. The public must demand a more diverse coverage
and news organisations must provide it. But the problem lies not so
much in failure of will as in the structure of news creation and
dissemination. In the same way that stock markets have rules to
prevent avalanches of panic selling, news organisations should
consider creating structural methods of diversifying their coverage
even in times of intense political and cultural scandal. These
structural provisions cannot be the product of government fiat but
rather must come from within media organisations themselves. In the
United States, at any rate, governments role must be limited to
supplementing existing broadcasting with more balanced fare.

One might object that news organisations cover
media events, politicians and scandals in the way that they do
because they are behaving rationally given the incentives to increase
or maintain audience share. That may be true, but one can also say
that sellers in a market panic are also behaving rationally given
what other people are doing. Rational behaviour occurs against a
background of incentives produced by structures. Our goal should be
to understand how existing structures operate and to change them for
the better.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Bruce Ackerman and Lincoln Caplan for
their comments on a previous draft, and to Cristina Rodriguez for her
research assistance.

References

Anon. 1998: Dow Rises on Poll Support for Clinton, Financial
Times (London), September 15, p. 52.

J. M. Balkin is
Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at
Yale Law School. He teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional
law (with a special emphasis on issues of free expression), torts,
jurisprudence, telecommunications and cyberspace law,
multiculturalism, social theory, and the theory of ideology.
Professor Balkin is the founder and director of Yale's Information
Society Project, a center devoted to the study of law and the new
information technologies. He is the author of Cultural Software: A
Theory of Ideology (Yale University Press 1998), as well as many
articles on constitutional law and legal, cultural, and social theory.

1.This accountability can be direct accountability (for
example, the ability to sue), indirect accountability (holding
officials accountability to ones agents or elected
representatives) or accountability to some other body that acts in
the public interest, like a court of law.

2.Jean Baudrillard (1994) is famous for his emphasis on the
emergence of simulacra  signs which constitute
their own reality. He describes a historical progression in which
images first depict reality, then distort it, then hide the fact that
the reality they depict is missing, and finally produce their own
hyperreality. In this progression, simulations
begin as false representations of reality; they end as the basic
building blocks of a hyperreality. My concern in this essay is
somewhat different from Baudrillards and I do not adopt his
language of simulations versus simulacra. I
am particularly interested in the ways that mass media can divert
audience attention and supplement political reality. The example of
law firm discovery practices offered in the next section of text
suggests that diversion of attention and supplementation of reality
are old stratagems that can arise without mass media. Indeed, these
techniques are ancient military stratagems described in Sun Tzus
famous treatise The Art of War (1991). For this reason, I
would not describe diversion and supplementation as creating a new
hyperreality. Nevertheless, I do agree with Baudrillard (and with
McLuhan, for that matter) that the rise of mass media (and
particularly televisual mass media) has important effects on our
sense of what is important in life as well as what is real.

3.In the case of transparency of participation or
accountability, we want to make the medium transparent to
political will so that what is on the other side of the medium will
respond efficaciously to assertions of political will.

5.This is not a claim of technological determinism. What we
call the medium of television involves not only electronic systems of
delivery but social relations: the economics and culture of
television production. The definition of good television
has changed over the years, and continues to evolve. Nevertheless, it
has tended to evolve in the way I have described.

6.Broadcast of legislative and court proceedings offer yet
another example of how transparency can be simulated. C-SPAN and
C-SPAN2 cover only hearings and debates; they do not show the actual
places where most public policy decisions are made. Moreover, there
are strict limits on where the cameras can be aimed, so that the
audience does not know whether a Senator or congressman is speaking
to a full audience or an empty house, or whether the person sitting
five feet away from the speaker is listening attentively, is sleeping
through the eloquent appeal or has collapsed in a drunken stupor. On
C-Spans coverage and camera restrictions, see Sharkey (1996);
Grimes (1995); Anon. (1995).

7.Members of the candidates family can serve as props in
these pageants. A well-known example is the news coverage of
President Clinton dancing with his wife Hillary in a seemingly
unguarded moment during a vacation in the Virgin Islands. The
photographs seemed to reveal a moment of unrehearsed marital harmony
in the midst of the Presidents troubles in the Paula Jones
lawsuit and the Monica Lewinsky investigation, but some have
speculated that the private moment was planned for public consumption
(Smith 1988). See also Harris (1998), speculating on the status of
the Clinton marriage after the President and First Lady are seen
dancing closely at a state dinner for Vaclav Havel.

9.Note that media events are normally staged by people at the
top of the political hierarchy rather than by subordinates whose
decisions may actually have more direct effects on individuals. One
does not expect motor vehicle department workers, welfare
caseworkers, probation officers, or other members of the bureaucracy
to engage in media events on a regular basis.

11.See. e.g., Baker (1998) (pornographic reporting);
Goodman (1998) (describing coverage of the Lewinsky scandal as
unusually salacious.); Gumbel (1998) (American political
commentators and comedians have made sexually explicit references
that would have been unthinkable prior to the scandal); Gurdon (1998)
(documenting medias practice, as a result of the Lewinsky
coverage, of attaching warnings to their broadcasts to alert viewers
unaccustomed to torrents of sexually explicit reporting).

13.See, e.g., Burke (1998) (citing a New York Times/CBS
poll documenting that the publics view of the Presidents
moral character has sunk to its lowest level, but that most Americans
still believe Clinton to be a vigorous leader); Anon. (1998) (citing
a CBS survey recording Clintons approval rating at 67%, despite
the fact that most Americans claimed to respect the President less as
a person). Indeed, the release of the videotape of President
Clintons grand jury testimony on September 21, 1998 actually
resulted in a temporary increase in his overall approval ratings
(Connelly 1998; Baer 1998; Lawrence 1998).

14.See Williams (1998) (crediting the Drudge report with
producing an unedited flood of Lewinsky scandal coverage); Noah
(1998) (arguing that the Drudge Report, by scooping the
mainstream media, escalated the intensity and explicitness of the
Lewinsky coverage).

15.Thus, the question is not whether journalists will publish
unconfirmed stories about private sexual behaviour because someone
else who lacks their investigatory standards publishes these stories.
The question is whether journalists will publish private
information, which is believed to be true by their existing
journalistic conventions of investigation after someone else has
published it. Once that happens, there are very strong pressures to
disseminate it.

16.This applies, with some modifications, to the British Royal
Family and its current problems. Beginning in the 1950s Queen
Elizabeth II attempted to use television as a device to modernise the
monarchy by portraying the British royal family as a model family
that Britons could relate to. The result of this campaign over the
years was to make the British monarchy more human, and thus more
transparent to the public. However, the campaign had an
unintended side effect  it turned the royal family into
television characters and television celebrities. Princess Diana was
the most obvious example of this tendency. The problem with making
British Royalty into television celebrities was that it also
increased the publics and the medias sense of entitlement
to know about the details of their private lives. Formerly the
British Royals were wrapped around a veil of secrecy that supported
the publics image of them as role models and icons of
respectability. But under the glare of publicity, they were revealed
to be just as dysfunctional  if not more so  than the
average British family. Their image and the British publics
confidence in them have suffered as a result. See, e.g., Anon. (1997)
(describing coverage of the death of Princess Diana in context of the
historical evolution of the cult of celebrity surrounding the British
royal family); Judd (1994) (noting that after many years of
pretending to be the ideal family, the British royal family has been
revealed to be dysfunctional); Zweininiger-Bargielowska (1993)
(comparing the lurid press coverage of today with high hopes held for
the British Royal family in the 1950s); Hoggart (1987) (describing
how media coverage has revealed unpleasant facts about the royal family).

17.Bill Clinton, for example, won two presidential elections by
consistently making voters feel that he personally cared about them.
Indeed, one of the clichés most often used to describe
President Clintons personal style is his famous remark
delivered in the 1992 campaign that I feel your pain.
Clinton has proven himself a master at pushing himself  his
emotions, his desires, his empathy, his appetites, even his moments
of personal pain  at the American public. Clinton is the master
emotional exhibitionist, which is why he is also one of the most
effective politicians of his time. Nevertheless, he who lives by
ethos shall die by ethos. It is no accident that accusations of bad
character have continuously swirled around President Clinton. His
political style  which is also his personal style 
actively invites discussion of his character because so much of his
appeal comes from his personality and his apparent emotional
closeness to the voting public.

18.See, e.g., Kurtz (1998) (citing sloppy investigation and
unbalanced reporting in coverage of the Lewinsky scandal); Gitlin
(1998) (noting release of the report by the Committee of Concerned
Journalists criticising media coverage of the scandal); Snoddy (1998)
(describing condemnation of the Lewinsky coverage by Brills Content).